Technology Overview
Post-War Modern Tech Overview When the Wars were over, civilization as it was known was completely reset to the Stone Age. People alive at the time fixed up and jury-rigged what they could, but so much damage was done to the infrastructure that most places were lucky if they could find a single disposable nanobot factory to make warm clothes. Most of the old renaissance technologies ended up being burned out to help civilization rebuild. It didn't help that most of the survivors weren't brilliant engineers or mages, only a few actually made it through that knew how the machinery worked. Most of those people would either die of old age or get killed off as new nations struggled to develop before they could spread their knowledge. Sometimes those people were actively targeted, to keep progressional development from happening. The “Fallout” period only lasted for a hundred years when people had access to loads of pre-Wars equipment, and almost all of it is gone, burned out or melted down for new things to be made. What little exists from those days will invariably either be confiscated by government powers, or end up in some collector's private museum at great personal cost. It has taken eight hundred years for civilization to rebuild from a stone age to the current industrial/invention one. It might have gone farther, but the worlds are a lot more hostile than they used to be; much more than Earth. On the up side, the new civilizations are still finding priceless relics known as Recuperation Texts, hand-written books written by a number of factions who figured out that the Wars would wreck everything known and so copied down all they could and sealed them away. Early post-apoc explorers digging through the ruins began discovering these Texts, and these allowed the burgeoning societies to skip thousands of years of trial and error development. But the problem with the Texts is that they're books, not magical tomes, just plain old books, and they all have different sets of information. There's no guarantee a Text will have immediately useful practical informationone might explain how to make a quantum levitation engine for hovercars, but not how to make the tools to build it, and the tools needed might not even exist anymore, rendering the Text useless. Compounding the issue of progress, but stimulating refinement, is the demand for immediate solutions to immediate problems over idealistic revival of a lost renaissance. The struggles faced by today's worlds demand sturdy articles that can last for years rather than fancy, fragile toys that'll be out of date in a few months. Innovators are driven by their respective nations and employers to develop things that are useful now instead of what might be useful a hundred years from now. Terribly few people, genius or otherwise, have the opportunity to focus on Federation tech, and those few that do often find that they are like cavemen trying to understand spaceflight. So little has been preserved, and what of it is too complex to be understood by the current generations. Perhaps the most significant impactor upon progress is pressure from external sources: many brilliant minds don't survive long enough to develop or confirm advancements. Many end up being targeted by rival nations working to keep their enemies from advancing too far past themselves. Others fall victim to jealous colleagues of lesser intellect and easily bruised egos who work to discredit them or have them suffer 'accidents.' And then there's the general brutality that governs the modern age; it's just not safe to go a great many places. So what does that mean for you? Think things like.. Final Fantasy VI, Super Robot Wars: Endless Frontier, Girl Genius, Breath of Fire 3, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and 3, the old Phantasy Star games, Xenogears, Monster Hunter, stuff like that. You live in a magical dieselpunk world where swords and spears are as viable as guns and rockets, where mages are as deadly as artillery, and where giant robots and airplanes might be seen fighting dragons and other colossal monstrosities. A world where digital technology has existed for a grand total of ten years, and has yet to achieve widespread popularity due to its sensitivity and costs. A universe where chemistry is as valuable as alchemy. The worlds are supported by these elements, coupled with a tiny handful of awesome wonders from the past. Golden Memories As noted before, the Recuperation Texts aren't always as helpful as they could be. Many end up being shelved in secret government storehouses to be safely kept until the day they are useful again. Sometimes they're shelved for the sake of naked greed, but other times.. The knowledge can be dangerous. It is not unheard of, for example, for doctors, surrounded by patients with life-threatening ailments and injuries that they know should be easily cured, to descend into an obsessive depression and try to use the Texts' knowledge to cure their patients without having the right tools. Sometimes this leads to suicide, sometimes it leads to horrific atrocities committed in the name of medicine that has led to gross inhumanities that leave countless dead, and more ruined for life. Engineers aren't safe from such malaise either. Many compounds, principles, and devices are written down that should be simple to make and use, if only the necessary machinery existed. Without that equipment, trying to make certain things can be.. Explosively dangerous that leave entire towns a smouldering ruin. Certainly, it would be nice to have monomollecular wire meshes and antimatter drives, and thousands of other brilliant devices, but it's just too dangerous to try. And it's even more dangerous to leave that information laying about. So these and many other Texts are locked away, guarded from the unscrupulous and unstable lest they be misused, until such time as the knowledge contained within can be put to good and proper use. The majority of what renaissance technologies remain do so under government regulation. Reactors, spaceships, massive vehicles, factories- they're all extremely difficult to maintain and nine times out of ten, only federal powers have the necessary resources to safeguard and operate these machines. Occasionally some smaller things can be procured, like plasma-based welding torches or badge-sized audio devices, but these are expensive things that are often relegated to the realms of highly skilled professionals performing high risk or otherwise intense jobs. See A Need, Fill A Need Just because most of the old stuff is gone, doesn't mean modern science and magic hasn't tried to keep up and provide people with comfortable lives. Maglev tubes might be gone, but public transit systems exist. Plumbing networks with waste separation and water treatment facilities still exist, albeit they take up whole blocks rather than a single building. Refrigerators exist, along with cars, trains, motorcycles, boats, and aircraft of all sorts. The most common form of fuel is biodiesel made from various crop plants with chemical and alchemical additives, followed by thermal batteries that rely on solar and geothermal energy to provide power, and even fusion batteries which last for years at a time at massive cost. Despite the label of dieselpunk, there isn't a lot of actual fossil fuel to go around; coal, petrol, and other such things are extremely rare. Computer technologies are lagging, but have been heavily refined and become widespread. They're expensive, but very durable. The average desktop tower is a huge, heavy brick of a machine, often weighing around 200 lbs. as the manufacturers develop specialized cases and shields to protect the sensitive digital components so that they'll last for more than a few years- things these days need to be made to last for decades at a time. The most advanced models boast upwards of a full gigabyte of hard drive space, and 100 MHz 16-bit processors. Laptops are also pretty big and heavy, and being portable means sacrificing power; few lappies have more than a couple hundred megabytes of HDD space, and that's only if they come from reliable, high quality sources. What makes them popular, aside from their various potential applications like security, data transfer and storage, and gaming, are a lot of very useful innovations. First is the use of non-conductive industrial plastics over metal for shielding, providing dust protection that won't rust away and can easily be removed for maintenance. Second is the development of Liquid Crystal Displays to let people make smaller, flatter screens- LCD screens rendered Cathode Ray Tube designs obsolete before they'd even become widespread, so the average TV and monitor is pretty flat and laptops can have light, thin screens instead of bulky CRT monitors. Finally, a major reason for computers becoming slowly but surely more ubiquitous is due to the discovery of a Recup Text which detailed several freeware versions of the Unix operating system, which led to the development of the small, fluid, and intuitive OrcaOS; which enjoys universal use and isn't too hard to learn. These developments have in turn led to the creation of PNet, spearheaded by the Inixians, to create interplanetary communications networks that provide customers with simple but stable internet connections- think of how the internet worked in the early 1990s, and that's about what you've got. Other computer systems exist, a handful from the Federation's glory days, but they tend to fall into one of three categories: those owned by federal governments, those on starships, and those possessed by rogue AI. In the first two cases, these are tertiary systems; backup systems for backup systems made by paranoid engineers in the event of “worst case” scenarios where primary and secondary systems might fail. Those tertiary failsafes, which are efficient and easy to use even by idiots, exist pretty much solely to keep operations running, they're not capable of performing any functions beyond the most critical of operations. The computers employed by AIs are powerful tools, but incompatible with modern computers and tend to be guarded by insane mechanical monstrosities that have gone completely crackerjacks from centuries of absolute isolation. Stuck in endless logic loops or deterioration of software and hardware from disuse, a mad AI is as dangerous as a hungry dire wolf, and half as reasonable. Resource Scarcity Charybdis's inner worlds have seen numerous strip-mining campaigns in its past, not just during the Federation's collapse but at multiple points in pre-human history, and the outer worlds are often volatile environments where survival can be ridiculously difficult- and then there's the monsters. Surface deposits of valuable minerals like aluminum, tin, iron, lead, copper, and zinc are hard to find unless you dig pretty deep. Fossil fuel deposits are rare, in many regions virtually nonexistent. Biofuels are a common source of fuel, because growing corn for biodiesel is a lot easier than trying to find petrol; even with the threat of monster attacks. And more dangerous materials, like plutonium and uranium, are not only extremely rare but often magnets for mutated beasts and tend to attract saboteurs like flies to vinegar. Recycling has, as such, become a huge industry- a few nations have built their entire economies on hoarding garbage, sorting it, and melting it down to be reused. People frequently use substitutions like plastics, brick, ceramics, and wood instead of steel and iron, even hides, bones, and various monster parts, to help ease the demand for common necessities. Setting Information Back to Main Page